David Cope on Editing Bridges Across the Pacific: A Chinese American Empathy Anthology; Interviewed by Kirpal Gordon




Poets approaching the Continental Divide on the Fouth of July Trail, 1994

Note:  This interview took place over a period of 10 days at the end of August, 2015, conducted via email and with time for reflection before response.  In addition, I have developed extensive lists of Works Consulted and some translations of Chinese poetry into English, many of which figure in the work here. My thanks to Kirpal for his thoughtful questions, and to Jim Cohn and my daughter Jane Cope, for their suggestions.   DC

 



KP: I just got wind of your new project, 100 Best Chinese and American Empathy Poems. Although I have not yet seen the Chinese poets, I found the selected American poets to be one of the more diverse collections of talent in any anthology I have read; for example:  Gary Snyder, Nancy Mercado, Sam Hamill, W. Todd Kaneko, Anne Waldman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Joanne Kyger and others. That's quite a range. How did this book come about and what was the most difficult part: getting permissions from presses or translating to and from Chinese?

 

DC:  First, diversity is a central component in the selection process and as I work on this interview, Jim Cohn and I are still in the stages of selection and permission to reprint the poems.  While most of the poets are already on board with permissions, we are working through the requests with several poets’ publishers, including some of those you’ve named.  Thus, we’re not yet at the stage of contracting with a publisher; editor and translator Zhang Ziqing of the Institute of Foreign Literature at Nanjing University can’t make a deal until we have a completed manuscript, and this problem is complicated by the fact that he may have to translate a poet’s poem with no certainty that the poet will be included.  So we’re at what I guess we’d call the “on hold for now” stage, negotiating and awaiting decisions, patient but persistent. Re translation:  from my own experience of working with Zhang, I can say that he is a meticulous professional when it comes to making sure that he translates each poem properly; he’ll pepper the poet with questions until he’s sure of what the poem “does” in English, and then work with it in Chinese.  The process will, in any case, be a long one; Zhang is currently updating the Chinese selection by including more women poets, for example, and he has reservations about some of our selections, which to his mind don’t truly fit the mode of the empathy poem as defined in China.  Jim is also going through the English translations of the Chinese poets and giving Zhang his critiques of the translations as poems in English. 



Jim & Isabella Cohn

How this book came about:  The historical connection is a wildly turning path involving editors, poets, translators, and scholars; it begins with Allen Ginsberg’s 1984 visit to China, develops in the translations of Kerouac and Ginsberg by Professor Wen Chu-an at Sichuan University, and grows toward our generation in Wen Chu-an’s earlier connection to Vernon Frazer’s work and later, with Jim Cohn in his efforts to develop an anthology which Wen could translate.  Even during the period when Cohn and Frazer were working simultaneously with Wen, neither knew of the other until much later in the work.  Zhang Ziqing notes that, among the various groups of American poets who have visited China, Frazer attended the 2004 “Beat Meets East:  an International Interdisciplinary Conference on the Age of Spontaneity” (Dialogue 66), a conference made possible by the “vision and commitment” of Professor Wen Chu-an and Professor Bill Lawlor  (Ball).  The spirit of the conference was established in Gordon Ball’s keynote address exploring the influence of the East on American literary masters, and particularly the Chinese influence on the Beats, especially in the poems of Bai Juyi and Allen Ginsberg.  After the conference, Frazer went on to read his poems in both Beijing and Nanjing (Zhang, Dialogue 66).  Most importantly, Ball’s address and Zhang’s “Dialogue” establish that both Wen Chu-an and Zhang Ziqing were at the same conference, and that Zhang’s connection with Frazer begins here:  he notes that on the day after Vernon’s reading, he drove Frazer and his wife around Nanjing, showing them the sights.  Later,  Vernon published The Selected Poems of Post-Beat Poets in Beijing (2008), and Chinese poet Lan Lan noted that Vernon’s anthology was warmly received in China, that it was seen as “a kind of new poetry which is a continuation and development of Beat poetry after the death of Allen Ginsberg” (quoted in Zhang , Dialogue 67). 

 

 

Also in 2004, Peter Hale of the Allen Ginsberg Trust gave Jim Gordon Ball’s phone number, and Ball gave Jim the email address of Wen Chu-an. Jim wrote to ask if they could work together on an anthology introducing Chinese readers to translations of postbeat American poets “after receiving a copy of his 2001 Chinese/ English bilingual edition of Howl: Allen Ginsberg: Selected Poems (1947-1997) as a gift  from Beat generation book collector Walt Smith” (Cohn, “All Loves”).  Jim wrote Wen on 8 September 2004 with this request (Cohn, Email to Wen);  the suggestion worked, and by December of the same year, Jim supplied Wen with a contents, description of the proposed project, a revised introduction, and bios.  He suggested that he’d review the text one more time before sending that, and noted that he still had work to do on the acknowledgements. After a good beginning, there was a long hiatus when he no longer received answers to his queries, and in 2009, Vernon Frazer shared the news that Wen had died of a heart attack. 

 

Zhang notes that Wen Chu-an kept “in close touch with me since the 1980s.” Zhang was “an editor on contemporary American literature in English Language for Contemporary Foreign Literature, one of the few major journals in this field in China,” and he supported Wen’s introduction of Postbeat poetry “by publishing his essay with his translation of some Postbeat poems for the first time in China.” Wen also asked Zhang “to proof-read his translation of [Frazer’s] Selected Poems of Post-Beat Poets” and introduced Wen to Chu Chen, his publisher. He notes, “unfortunately, his sudden death interrupted the anthology. As a friend of his, I had to continue his project with writing a preface and adding a few more Postbeat poets. Then Vernon introduced you and Jim to me when I began to add a chapter on Postbeat poetry to my book A History of 20th Century American Poetry” (Zhang, email to David Cope).  Sometime after Wen Chu-an’s death, Zhang’s first email appeared in Jim’s inbox:  "May I first introduce myself to you? A friend of Vernon and the late Chu-An as well as Anne [Waldman], and a translator of part of Selected Poems of Post-Beat Poets edited by Vernon Frazer, which came out in China, 2008. I met Ginsberg twice. First I was invited by him to attend his poetry reading together with Anne Waldman in New York from Harvard University in the winter of 1993, and then went to meet him in San Francisco from Berkeley when he signed his name on his new book of poems for the readers in a big bookstore, 1994."

 

Frazer had asked Zhang to open the Museum of American Poetics link to the Postbeat Poets Activist Scholarship Project, and in particular to read Jim’s essay, “Postbeat Poets” (Cohn, Postbeat).  The relationship began with Zhang’s questions about Jim’s essay; Jim later collaborated with him, “adding a number of 20th and 21st century Chinese poets to MAP’s international exhibits” (All Loves).  The originally envisioned anthology eventually fell by the wayside, but Zhang included a chapter on the postbeat poets in his upcoming two-volume study of contemporary American poetry, with translations and discussion of some of our poems.  He eventually suggested the idea for this bilingual empathy anthology of Chinese, Chinese-American, and American poets, and Jim and I began collecting American poems around 2013, realizing later that we needed a more particular definition of the brief Chinese empathy poem.  We’ve all been quite busy in the period after 2013, and made little progress on the idea until several months back, when Zhang began choosing from my poems for a selection that he intended to translate and publish.  Thus began a three month period of questions and answers concerning my lines,  words, and phrases, all with the idea of “getting it right” in Chinese.  I suggested that I could begin working on the empathy anthology toward the end of July or beginning of August, and I went to it with a fervor.  And here we are, at this stage of trying to complete a few last selections and obtain a few permissions. The connection back to Allen’s 1984 visit remains a fascinating, wildly turning path with many blind leads, wrong turns, and a few highlights.

Allen Ginsberg's Kousa Dogwood

KP: Is it fair to say that you are one of the living practitioners of the Objectivist tradition of American poetry, and at age 67, you are indeed one its elders? How did Charles Reznikoff and company strike you as a young poet & reader of verse? What was the Allen Ginsberg connection and how did your poetry and scholarship prepare you to edit and deliver an antho like 100 Best Chinese and American Empathy Poems. I take it the title is a nod to Kenneth Rexroth, yes?

DC:  There are several questions here, so let’s take them one at a time.

 

Living practitioner of the objectivist tradition:  Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams were the two 20^th century poets whose work gave me the tools to develop my own approach to the art—Charles for his focus on those most vulnerable in our society, for his close attention to the specifics of his subjects, the psychologically astute use of images, the tightly constructed narrative in plain English, and Williams for his endless experimentation with free verse forms and closeness to intense human experience, ranging from the mental leaps that inform poems like “The Last Words of My English Grandmother” or “For Eleanor and Bill Monahan,” his occasional crazy jazz line (“Shoot it Jimmy!), chant-based poems (“The Catholic Bells”) or heavily accented off-balance rhythms (“The Kermess”).  Then, too, he was a master of the open field (see pages 54-61 of Paterson, for example),  and his explorations of what he called “the variable foot” (explained in a letter to Richard Eberhart, Selected Letters 326-27) showed an appreciation

for the silent count worthy of Satie.  So they and Whitman, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dante—all completed my poetic “toolbox” of technique.  Dante showed me ways to make multi-layered verse that could satisfy both a curious 10th grader and the Dantescan scholar busy ferreting out the allusions and historical references, a seamless narrative honoring all who open the book.  I have lived and breathed

Shakespeare for over fifty years, spending my last twenty years teaching his work at two colleges—and his language often silently informs mine.

 

So yes, Reznikoff’s objectivism and WCW’s great experimental imagist verse are the root and foundation of my own work, though I refuse categories and will work in whatever approach to a poem seems most appropriate to its subject or if that’s how it “comes to me.”  The idea is to write carefully crafted poems that honor their subjects as they are.

Robert Duncan, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen & Carl Rakosi

 

How the objectivist poets struck me as a youth:   I had

copies of Oppen’s Of Being Numerous and Reznikoff’s By

the Waters of Manhattan:  Selected Verse during my late

teen years, but really got the full dose in 1973 at the National

Poetry Festival at Allendale, Michigan, when Charles,

George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi were invited to read and do

a colloquium together, queried by Allen Ginsberg and

Robert Duncan, with occasional remarks by Kenneth

Rexroth.  Sue and I also walked out to the midsummer

bonfire with George and Mary Oppen, he quiet while she

recounted their youth, escaping to France where the peasants

had great fires lit up in the hills, a gift tale, I think, from an

older couple to two young kids still in the flush of our first

years together.  George really came alive at his reading later,

as did Carl, but to my mind, Charles cut through everything

that had been said throughout the conference with his

trenchant depression-era realism, his poems read with a

quiet, steely voice, confronting the horrors of hunger,

poverty and homelessness, as well as labor under non-union

conditions.  The subjects were honored for their innate

dignity even in struggle and loss.  Some months later, when I

decided to begin publishing my indie poetry mag, Big

Scream, my poet mentor in that endeavor, Eric Greinke,

gave me a copy of Charles’s Five Groups of Verse, self-

published in 1927 and signed in 1973—it has remained one

of the great treasures of my personal library to this day.

 

The Allen Ginsberg connection:  I’ve already covered the wild turning history that begins with Allen’s 1984 visit to China, which introduced Chinese scholars and poets to his own work and to American poems—including some of my own short poems from Quiet Lives—that he felt they would appreciate.

The opening he began also brought younger American poets together for conferences in China, which led to Vernon Frazer’s anthology of postbeat poets, and indirectly led to the making of this anthology.  It’s a strange but exciting thought that, even though dead for eighteen years now, he is still showing younger generations paths for their work to create shared connections and compassion.

 

Looking back, Charles Reznikoff’s poems functioned as a shared love between Allen and me. After the 1973 conference, I changed my life in a variety of significant ways, including starting my work as an indie editor and publisher. When I published my Stars, a 36 page mimeo chapbook with poems that drew from Reznikoff’s and Williams’s sense of compression and close observation of working lives, I tried to honor my co­-workers and the people in the tough working class neighborhood where I lived, and in those ghetto neighborhoods where I worked both as school custodian and apartment clean-up man.  I wrote Allen and sent him the chapbook, and he wrote back, asking for twelve copies and enclosing a check, also asking about me.  I wrote back and explained my work as a factory worker, custodian and apartment cleaner, and asked that one copy be sent to Reznikoff—he in turn noted that Charles had died several months before, but wanted to know all about my fascination with him.  Thus began a twenty-some year correspondence which also included publication opportunities, visits to Naropa and Brooklyn College, and especially to the 1987 objectivist conference, where I was paired to read with Carl Rakosi, still one of the greatest honors of my career.
 

Charles Reznikoff

 

Poetry and scholarship as preparation for this empathy anthology:  my work as a post-graduate student taught me how to do deep scholarship in a subject, and that has been central to working in a disciplined and careful way.  I have read Chinese poetry from the time when I first encountered Ezra Pound’s work while still a high school student, but I was not a scholar of Chinese poetry and in many ways still consider myself a rank beginner in the field, feeling my way through questions to Zhang Ziqing and to my friend Wang Ping even as I have embarked on a reading list that will keep me busy for months and years to come.  It does not particularly help that I have no knowledge of the Chinese language, though I have learned a great deal about their poetics once placed in this position.  I’m also fortunate to have a first-class working editing relationship with Professor Zhang.  He has translated twenty-four of my poems at this point, and I have been continuously impressed with his questions—pointing out words or phrases that either don’t work in Chinese or need clarification.  I’ve been forthcoming with him, changing or explaining words to increase clarity in English and which give him a means to approach the poems in Chinese, and along the way I’ve observed differences in our language processes and, in particular, I’ve come to appreciate his intense curiosity and willingness to work with me to be sure he gets it right. 

Per the editing, I suppose there is the basic eye one needs for a great variety of quality work, as befits my forty-one years editing and publishing my magazine (see my recent interview, conducted by Jim Cohn, at Big Bridge (Cope, Moving On).  Also, there were three anthologies that I edited and shepherded into print earlier in my career.
 

The first of these, Nada Poems (Nada, 1988) involved seventeen poets whom I had met during my visits to Naropa, New York, Hoboken and New Brunswick, etc., and the volume was paid for via the huge check I was given for winning a 1988 award in literature from the American Academy/Institute of Arts and Letters (now, simply the American Academy of Arts and Letters) for my second book, On the Bridge.  Jim Cohn, Joel Kuszai, Chris Ide and I learned how to work with Macs in a 30 minute session at a time when emails and the internet itself were still a computer geek’s dream and few poets could be bothered with computers.  We worked like devils and had the manuscript file ready after a coffee-fueled all-night session in the Michigan State University computer lab.  Distribution continued for years, until after two decades, almost all of the 1500 copies were gone.  

After this came Sunflowers & Locomotives:  Songs for Allen, a 58 page anthology of paeans, mementos and elegiac poems for Allen Ginsberg.  After Allen died, I was among those who served as a press contact for him, answering questions from reporters calling from across the nation.  Later, I was deluged with poems from friends and people I barely knew or had never met, and in short order I had the makings of an anthology.  Chris Funkhouser shared his classic portrait of Allen on his 12^th Street fire escape for the front cover, the famed  Boulder photographer Steve Miles contributed a fine portrait of Allen with a very young Peter Hale for the back, and a xerox of Allen’s handwritten transcription of Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” became the final page of this one, a labor of love for a great poet who happened to be a superb friend as well. 

The last, and most ambitious of these projects, was Song of the Owashtanong, a 185 page collection of sixteen of the most gifted poets from my hometown, put together over a period of a year and paid for with grants, published by Detroit poet M. L. Liebler’s Ridgeway Press.  This work, edited and published during the same period as I was shepherding a four day Grand Rapids Poets’ Conference, taught me the importance of using every available minute to make sure the thing came out properly.

Thus all of the above prepared  me well, not only for the selection, editing, and documentation, but also for the hard work involved—and the constant need for patience and flexibility.

Title as nod to Rexroth?  Actually, I had nothing to do with the original title—this was Zhang’s idea.  We have since amended the title to Bridges Across the Pacific: A Chinese-American Empathy Anthology.  The project is ultimately his, as he is translator of both Chinese poets into English and American poets into Chinese.  Further, he’s the one arranging publication and distribution in China.  Jim’s and my tasks are limited to finding 50 poets whose short work (10-20 lines or so) fits the definition of a Chinese empathy poem, as well as critiquing the English translations of the Chinese poets.  In the process of selection, I wrote a preface for the American approach to this kind of poem, defining it in terms of our imagist and objectivist principles, which both reify the Chinese model and represent a practice that allows for great stylistic variation within our traditions.  Rexroth is, of course, important to many of us in this generation; both Antler and I, for example, have written elegies for him, and many revere him for his 100 Poems from the Chinese and Love and the Turning Year.

 

KP: So far, the American strand of this collection does not seem especially political in its thrust, and some may find a flaw in that fact, given the often unsettled state of affairs between China and the USA. Still, it's no exaggeration to say that we live in interesting times, yes?

 

DC: There’s a long history of philosophical and political disagreements, outright warfare during the Korean conflict, and cultural and historical critiques offered by both sides—enough pain to go around in the continuing fact that we humans perpetrate horrors on each other.  American political poetry has been available in China for years, as in the case of Allen’s Howl, so they know our predilections in that sense.  There’s also the American tendency to criticize without reflection, smugly pointing the finger at another’s shortcomings while ignoring our own, including our incessant wars and war profiteering, the endless parade  of school shootings and police murders of black men, the push to destroy environmental treasures and indeed, planetary balance even as politicians decry climate change as fake while dancing to the tunes played by their corporate masters; being sanctimonious about other nations’ political and military behaviors while forgetting our own long history of near-genocide and theft of lands from the first peoples of this land—even today, in the “sale” of the sacred lands of the Apaches to a foreign mining company that will desecrate the land for the sake of their profits.  Gandhi once said, “turn the searchlight inward,” and that seems quite a propos of this aspect of the subject.

 

Both nations have much to answer for—yet as an elder who has watched these sorts of things all my life, I look across the globe to Zhang Ziqing and see a brother with a good heart and a work ethic that challenges my own—his hope is to explore empathy, the ability to understand or share the feelings of another—with a corresponding wish to find our common humanity.  I guess, in the end, I am hopeful that this project will bear good fruit.  The world sees too little of this kind of thing nowadays.

KP: In reading the American poems, nature and the 'ecology' of poetic form are singing reverence, remember, renew, receive, return. The empathy is grounded in the basic, the particular; surprise and awakening. Is the "eco nature poem" not one with Han Shan, October in the Railroad Earth, Rakosi and Reznikoff, Chuang Tzu?

 

DC: Yes, in many ways, especially in the sense of lands and seas, flora and fauna, all the particulars of this life as gifts, the place and the beings that give this journey an awakening quality during the brief time we have.  I do think the contemporary “eco nature poem” has one characteristic that many of these others may not have:  the sense that the particulars described in the poem—that natural beauty which can give form to our deepest aspirations, even in our suffering—could be irretrievably lost through wasteful and cruel human behavior in our march to carve up the planet, our blindness brought on by profit-driven greed, the insanity of warfare, overpopulation, etc.  Even when it is not directly stated, that awareness informs even the most apparently innocent nature poems in our era. 

 

As noted earlier, the poems in our selection grow from the Chinese definition of the “empathy poem” as provided by Zhang Ziqing in his introduction, and in some of its western equivalents, as I pointed out in my introduction to the American poems.  “Empathy” as found in this particular tradition is certainly a method of awakening reverence and renewal;  it is not mere pastoral with its gamboling sheep and roll-in-the-hay romance.  There are times when one returns to the mountain or the riverbank as a means to recover the awareness of what we humans have so often lost in the rush of our technology-driven “civilized” mode of living.  At times, the wilderness serves to heal and renew, particularly when one recovers the cultural awareness of traditions that connect humans to a spirituality which saw the sacredness of this place as part of daily practice.

 

It can also involve the revealing image of the world being degraded—empathy for Lake Michigan, for example, in Charles Reznikoff’s poem, even when the focus is on human carelessness and environmental cruelty in the “green depths”:  “They have built red factories along Lake Michigan, and the purple refuse coils like congers in the green depths” (19).  Sometimes, too, experience may shape different kinds of responses to the green world, as noted by Camille T. Dungy in her introduction to Black Nature and by Yusef Komunyakaa in his classic essay, “Dark Waters.”  Dungy notes that “many black writers simply do not look at their environment from the same perspective” as caucasian writers—for many, it is “an environment steeped in a legacy of violence, forced labor, torture, and death” (xxi).  Komunyakaa points out that African American communities are exposed to sickness, cancer, and early death as a result of exposure to chemical pollution, pesticides, etc. both on the job and from polluting industries near their neighborhoods.  There is a kind of empathy here, but it is located in the populations suffering as a result of an hostile environment.

 

Perhaps the most important difference between the older nature-based poems and the kinds of empathy and ecopoems in our selection, though, is that recovery of awareness often begins in the memory of elder traditions in which humans were understood as a part of the larger world.  This is especially true of Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s and Nancy Mercado’s work in this anthology, and in two poets whose work I hope will eventually be a part of this project—Joseph Bruchac and Linda Hogan.  Hogan’s encounter with the sea turtle recalls her ancestors’ wisdom:  the turtles as keepers of a door to another realm, the encounter part of “a path where beings truly meet.”  Bruchac tells a story of mountain climbing, turning to the reader to ask, “if you do manage to come back down, what gift do you bring, what hunger may greet you, and to which side will you return?”  

Mt. Audobon: Schwartz, Cope & dog Josh

 

KP: What is your official status with the university? At 67 years young, are you hoping to teach less, write more, retire, live forever, edit and/or write more books? What local projects are you engaged in and how do these square with your overall sense of mission as poet and scholar?

 

 

DC:  I retired from my position as an adjunct professor at Western Michigan University in 2004; I had given up pursuit of a doctorate degree there in 1997 after Allen died (I was very close, completing 30 hours of graduate classes beyond my masters degree, and in initial stages of preparing for my thesis).  The department then hired me to teach an evening Shakespeare class, which I thoroughly enjoyed until the hour long commute became too much for me.  My relation with my undergraduate school, the University of Michigan, continues to this day through twice a year visits to the Special Collections Library, where I make additions to my archive, The David Cope Papers. 

 

I retired from my full-time job at Grand Rapids Community College in 2013 after forty years of work, eighteen as a custodian and twenty-two as a professor.   I began as a night shift custodian at the poorest school in the city’s ghetto, and ended as senior Shakespeare professor, curriculum developer, gadfly, union representative, and poet laureate of the city of Grand Rapids.  There were seven years in the 90s when I was teaching six to seven classes per semester, attending graduate school by night, and raising my family of three children—and yet, while I was living on the run, I never let any of it get in the way of whatever my poetry career offered me back then.  The professor job was also a means to bring poets (Allen, Anne Waldman, Jim Cohn, Antler and Jeff Poniewaz, Carmen Bugan, Diane Wakoski) to the college for readings and colloquia, as well as a way to organizing a Pablo Neruda Centennial Celebration, a Women in the Arts Conference, and at the last, the aforementioned poets’ conference and local anthology.  In addition, I continued publishing my Big Scream magazine yearly, and gave readings when invited. 

 

I have not taught classes in over two years, and plan to avoid doing that kind of work altogether.  My three years of working in a factory and eighteen years as a custodian showed me that we are all cogs in wheels such as these.   I had known from early childhood that I was going to be a poet, and took these jobs to support myself and my family, to “keep the wolf from my door,” while at the same time always aware that retirement would give me time to ride my bike, do a proper job of gardening and forestry on my small plot of land, try to get The Invisible Keys (selected poems) and The Scythe (later poems) published, and do projects that I can believe in, like this one. 

Works Consulted

 

Ball, Gordon.  Keynote Address,  Beat Meets East:  International Conference on Literature in the Age of Spontaneity.  Chenghu, Sichuan, China:  Sichuan University.  3 June 2004.

 

Bruchac, Joseph.  “CLIMBING.” Eco-poetry.org. 2003, 2014. http://www.eco-poetry.org/joseph-bruchac_abenacki.html

 

Cohn, Jim. “All Loves Are The Way Onward:  Interview With Kirpal Gordon.”   The Museum Of American Poetics.  http://www.poetspath.com/homepage/interviews/GordonInterview.html

- - - - .  Email to Wen Chu-an.  8 September 2004.

- - - -.  “Postbeat Poets Activist Scholarship Project.”  The Museum of American Poetics.

http://www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/index.html 
[Scroll down and click for Jim’s essay, “Postbeat Poets.”]

Cope, David.  “An extraordinary volume of poems.” Review of Wang Ping’s Ten Thousand Waves.  Paterson Literary Review 43 (2015-2016):  265-268.  Online at Wings Press (scroll down):  http://www.wingspress.com/book.cfm?book_ID=175

- - - -, interviewed by Jim Cohn. “Moving On:  41 Years of Big Scream / Nada Press.”  Big Bridge 18.  http://bigbridge.org/BB18/features/BigScream/Big_Scream.html

- - - - .  Quiet Lives.  Foreword by Allen Ginsberg.  Totowa, New Jersey:  Humana, 1983.

- - - -, ed.  Nada Poems.  Grand Rapids:  Nada, 1988.

- - - -, ed.  Song of the Owashtanong:  Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21^st Century.  Roseville, MI: Ridgeway, 2013.

- - - -, ed.  Sunflowers & Locomotives:  Songs for Allen.  Grand Rapids:  Nada, 1998.

Dickinson, Emily.  The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.  Ed. Thomas H. Johnston. Eleventh printing.  Boston and Toronto:  Little, Brown, 1960.

Dungy, Camille T.. ed.  Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry. Athens:  University of Geogia Press, 2009.

Fisher-Wirth, Ann, and Laura-Gray Street, eds.  The Ecopoetry Anthology.  San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2013.

Frazer, Vernon.  “Extending the Age of Spontaneity to a New Era:  Post-Beat Poets in America.”

Beat  Meets East:  Presentations from a Conference.  Big Bridge 10.  Ed.  Michael Rothenberg.  http://www.bigbridge.org/issue10/fictvfrazer.htm
 

- - - - . “Post-Beat Poetry in China.”  Preface.  Selected Poems of Post-Beat Poets.  Beijing: Shanghai Century Publications, 2008.  Big Bridge 14 (2009): 

http://www.bigbridge.org/BB14/VF-PostBeatAnthology.pdf

Ginsberg, Allen.  Clear Seeing Poetics.  Unpublished classroom anthology, selected by Allen Ginsberg; includes some of the poems he taught in China.  Undated.

- - - - .  “Wales Visitation.” Collected Poems 1947-1980.  New York et al:  Harper & Row, 1984.  480-482, especially line 10, page 480.

 - - - - .  White Shroud:  Poems 1980-1985.  New York:  Harper & Row, 1986. 61-68.

H. D.  Collected Poems 1912-1944.  Ed. Louis L. Martz.  New York:  New Directions, 1986.

Huang Jie Han.  “On the Rewritings of On the Road in China.”  Guizhou University.  Masters Thesis.  Abstract.  2008.  http://www.dissertationtopic.net/doc/736213

Jones, Jim.  “How the Beats Came to China.”  Gadfly Online.  Charlottesville, Va.:  Gadfly Productions, 1998-2009.  http://www.gadflyonline.com/05-13-02/book-chinabeat.html

Katz, Eliot.  Email to David Cope.  5 August 2015.

 

Komunyakaa, Yusef.  “Dark Waters.”  The Colors of Nature:  Culture, Identity, and the Natural World.  Alison Hawthorne Deming and Lauret  E. Savoy, eds.  Minneapolis:  Milkweed, 2011.

Meyer, Mike.  “The World’s Biggest Book Market.”  With quotes from Wen Chu’an on Ginsberg and Kerouac.  The New York Times (13 March 2005).  N.p..  A Glimpse of the World: Snippets.  http://www.howardwfrench.com/2005/03/the_worlds_bigg/

Min yu.  “Allen Ginsberg and China.”  Theory and Practice in Language Studies 2.4 (April, 2012):  850-855.  Via Academy Publisher.  http://www.academypublication.com/issues/past/tpls/vol02/04/29.pdf

Pound, Ezra.  “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance.”  Personae.  New Directions, 1926, 1935, 1971. 

Rakosi, Carl.  “No One Talks About This.”  The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi.  Orono:  The National Poetry Foundation / University of Maine, 1986. 

Reznikoff, Charles.  Poems (#6).  The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975,  Ed. Seamus Cooney.  Boston:  Black Sparrow/David R. Godine, 2005. 19.

Rothenberg, Jerome, ed. and commentary.  Shaking the Pumpkin:  Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas.  Garden City:  Doubleday, 1972.

- - - - , ed. and commentary.  Technicians of the Sacred:  A Range of Poetries from Africa,America, Asia & Oceana.  Garden City:  Anchor/Doubleday, 1969. 

Schumacher, Michael.  Dharma Lion:  A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg.  New York:  St. Martin’s Griffin, 1992.  681-684.

Vizenour, Gerald, ed.  Summer in the Spring:  Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories.  Revised and enlarged ed.  Minneapolis:  Nodin Press, 1981.

Wang Ping.  Ten Thousand Waves.  San Antonio:  Wings Press, 2014.

- - - - .  Emails to David Cope.  August to 16 September 2015.

Wen Chu-an.  “Letter from China.”  The Blacklisted Journalist.  Letter copyright Al Aronowitz, to whom it was addressed.   2001.  http://www.blacklistedjournalist.com/column58e.html

Wen Chu-an, trans.  Howl:  Allen Ginsberg:  Selected Poems (1947-1997).  Sichuan:  Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, 2000.

- - - -, trans.  On the Road.  Guilin Shi:  Li Jiang chuban she, 2001.  World Cat:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/zai-lu-shang/oclc/52894745

Whitman, Walt.  Leaves of Grass and Other Writings.  Ed Michael Moon.  New York and London:  Norton, 2001.

Williams, William Carlos.  Paterson.  Revised ed.  New York:  New Directions, 1995.

- - - - .  The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams.  New York:  New Directions, 1957.  326-327.

Zhang Ziqing.  “A Dialogue between Chinese and American Poets in the New Century:  Their Poetry Reading, Translation and Writing in Collaboration.”  Comparative Literature:  East West 15.2 (Autumn/Winter 2011):  65-81.   Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.

- - - - .  Email to David Cope.  17 September 2015.

 - - - - .  Email to Jim Cohn.  5 March 2010

 

Some Translations from the Chinese

 

Alley, Rewi, trans.  200 Selected Poems.  By Bai Juyi [a.k.a. Po Chu-i].  Beijing:  New World Press, 1983.  65-66.

 

Chaves, Jonathan, trans. and ed.  The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry:  Yüan, Ming, And Ch’ing Dynasties (1279-1911).  New York and Guildford:  Columbia U P, 1986.

[see Watson, Burton for other volume in this set].

 

Graham, A. C., trans.  Poems of the Late T’ang.  Harmondsworth, Baltimore, and Victoria:  Penguin, 1965.

Hamill, Sam, trans.  Crossing the Yellow River:  Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese.  Rochester, N. Y.:  Tiger Bark, 2013. 

Hawkes, David, trans.  The Songs of the South:  An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets.  London, New York et al:  Penguin, 1985, 2011

 

Hinton, David, trans.  The Late Poems o Wang An-Shih.  New York:  New Directions, 2015.    
 

- - - -, trans.  The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan.  New York:  Archipelago, 2004.

- - - -, trans.  The Selected Poems of  Li Po.  New York:  New Directions, 1996.

- - - -, trans.  The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I.  New York:  New Directions, 1999.

- - - -, trans.  The Selected Poems of Tu Fu.  New York:  New Directions, 1989.

- - - -, trans.  The Selected Poems of Wang Wei.  New York, New Directions, 2006.

 

Ming Di, et al, trans.  New Cathay:  Contemporary Chinese Poetry.  North Adams:  Tupelo Press, 2013.  Online:             http://www.poetryfoundation.org/downloads/NewCathay_ChinesePoetry.pdf 

Red Pine (Bill Porter), trans.  The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain.  Revised and expanded ed. Port Townsend:  Copper Canyon, 2000.
 

- - - -, trans.  Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom.  By Sun Po-jen. Port Townsend:  Copper Canyon, 2012.

 - - - -,  trans.  Lao’ Tzu’s Taoteching.  Port Townsend:  Copper Canyon, 2009. 

- - - -,  trans.  Poems of the Masters:  China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse.  Mandarin Chinese and English ed.  Port Townsend:  Copper Canyon, 2003.

- - - -,  trans.  The Zen Works of Stonehouse (Shih-wu).  English and Chinese ed.  Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2014.

Rexroth, Kenneth, trans.  One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.  New York:  New Directions, 1971.

 

- - - - , trans.  Love and the Turning Year:  One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese. New York:  New Directions, 1970.

 

Snyder, Gary.  Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems.  50th Anniversary ed.  Berkeley:  Counterpoint, 2009. [Cold Mountain/Han Shan poems trans. by Gary Snyder].

Watson, Burton, trans. and ed.  The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry:  From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century.  New York and Guildford:  Columbia U P, 1984.  [See Chaves, Jonathan, for other volume in this set].

 

Waley, Arthur, trans.  Translations from the Chinese.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1919, 1940.

 

Antler & Jeff Poniewaz on the trail

“Leaping out of the Cave and into the Light” by Deanna Weber

 

For the longest time, I felt like a prisoner inside my own mind. My thoughts of how I wanted to live just did not seem to be as important as those of everyone around me. I was shy, confused and constantly contradicting myself. In order to morph into the ideal young adult, I felt that it was more of a priority for me to fit in, but getting so caught up in pleasing everyone else made me want to scream, then run away and hide. It was not until I broke the rules that I realized that who I am is who I choose to be. My identity, my decisions, and how I live my own life must be shaped by me.

Although it has helped me grow into the person that I am proud to be today, for most of my life I have been quite sheltered. South Amityville, New York, on Long Island’s southern shore, is a town of predominantly white people of Western European descent who all have one goal: to make their children seem successful. Everyone lives out the timeline the same way. For all the freedom of choice that is celebrated, there really is not much wiggle room not only this town, but also most of society. Although none of these regulations are written down anywhere, everyone knows they exist. One goes to the private elementary/middle school in the nearby area; one joins the local beach club in the summer to compete on the swim team; one takes sailing lessons; one attends one of the few Roman Catholic high schools on Long Island; then one applies and gets admitted to a $40,000-a-year, four-year college that is anywhere from a two hour car ride to a five hour plane ride away.

In my case, I was bound for New England where I thought I was entering a brave new world where I would break free from my Long Island roots and make the cliché of  “finding myself” a reality. I knew the main thing lacking in my education was an experience of diversity in regard to race, ethnicity, culture, homeland, economic status, outlook and values. En route to Cave College, my nickname a la Plato’s allegory for my chosen university and the darkest moment of my life, I had been itching to experience this variety. I remembered their pamphlet: four racially different students enjoying themselves on the campus. Although those four do attend the school, Cave students are about 75% Catholic-Caucasian and mostly from the surrounding area.

If Cave made an effort to gain diversity, it did not work so well. I knew a student there from California who told me she had an easier time getting admitted because of her West Coast address. I soon found out that her grades were not up to the caliber Cave apparently expected, so I was unsure why she was accepted. Diverse backgrounds are important to the school, but so should its academic integrity. Not being able to mesh the two was a turn-off for me. Although its mission statement supported diversity, I felt as if I had been lied to for this variety of people was not the case, which made my transition a lot more difficult than it might have been. I believed that most of my peers were leaving home and traveling to a brand new place. Knowing that everyone would feel the same uneasiness gave me comfort, but watching my roommate’s mom take her out to lunch every Friday because she lived ten minutes away not only made this homebody mama’s girl have a harder time adjusting, but it also changed my thoughts on the school. It was hard seeing her family members constantly around when I was in such a fragile homesick state. Not only did I long for students who did not look so much like me, but I also wanted to encounter people with more experience about different places and points of view.

Getting accepted into Hofstra University was my escape plan. During my winter break 2014-2015, I was not in a great place, and I needed a change. Originally, I thought the simple adjustment of living at home would be the major life-altering, happiness-lifting factor, but after a few weeks into the spring semester I saw there was much more to it. Simply put, Hofstra’s “almost urban” environ close to New York City was more suitable to me than the soccer mom town of Cave College. I am big on self-love and self-happiness, and diversity is something that can contribute to both of these things. For my whole life I have always blended in with everyone, doing what everyone does, dressing how everyone dresses, and being interested in the same things as others. However, the news I woke up to is that this had never been me. I never wanted to be like everyone else, and it took me nineteen years to realize that once I started to attend Hofstra.

When I walked into Writing 001, the only person I recognized was Amy Sassoon from the new student orientation; she is a Long Islander and transfer student from a big SUNY school. After talking with her, I realized her story was similar to mine, which was refreshing. I sat next to her which started my first real peer friendship at college and with a most remarkable person who was about to have her own big breakthrough. Nevertheless, I was no fan of writing. To me it has always been a chore, not something I enjoyed, let alone something I thought I was remotely good at. Over the years so many of my papers had been done the night before and submitted without revision. However, like my fears, my writing style was about to change. Professor Gordon walked in and asked us to set our desks in a circle. I had never done that in a class before, and it created such an open community feeling in the room. We each introduced ourselves and wrote the name we wanted to be called on a sheet of paper draped over the desk. Everyone got to see each other’s faces and share discussion. I noted the many Asian, African, Caribbean, South American, Middle Eastern and European heritages. It was inspiring to hear from the two students who had joined the Army, the Cornell transfer who only weeks before had been on death’s door, the Brazilian who mastered English in three month’s time. I had never been among so much difference in skin complexion, background and point of view. Instead of feeling conformist, inadequate or bored, it was refreshing to feel like a minority for once!

Moreover, the “text” for the first third of the semester was each other, and our first assignment was to interview a fellow student and demonstrate in our essay why he or she was an asset to us. I interviewed Jiahe Wang (see “The Three Tools Universities Forgot to Give Us,” July 12, 2015 at Taking Giant Steps Blog), a transfer student from Beijing. I never thought a student-to-student interview could mean so much, but it did. Though we’re from totally different backgrounds, it was incredible how similar we were. Each of us was so shy yet so open to share the answers and ease each other throughout the initial lack of comfort or when something just did not make sense.  After my experience at Cave, I was left with this dark cloud over me, making me believe that I was going to be surrounded by the same type of person for the rest of my young adult existence. Jiahe challenged that. She modeled excellence, and I was taken by her dedication, intelligence and experiences. When I read what she wrote about me, I had never believed anyone (besides maybe my mom and dad, of course!) could see me in such flattering terms. Authentic compliment after compliment flowed, and I know my heart started to open up to not only this new Hofstra beginning, but more importantly, my ability to accept this path that I have chosen. Not only did Jiahe’s essay on me stand out, but my essay on her sparked a new self-confidence. It was the first time I ever felt so good about something I had written. It made me realize that my mind was capable of thinking critically and reading below the surface. For a perfectionist who sometimes lacks esteem, my ability to compliment myself meant the world. I was on the road to gain what I had always wanted: self-expression that would lead to self-discovery.

Our next assignment was to experience a service that Hofstra provides students and persuade the class to value the service. Because of my interest in psychology, I chose the “shrink.” At first I was quite nervous to interview a complete stranger. I thought it might get weird or awkward, but it was the total opposite. He was so clear and well grounded (even just over the phone) and his information so useful. My biggest take-away was that I wrote very personal things about an anxiety disorder I deal with everyday. I knew it could be embarrassing, but actually, now when I look back on it, it seemed more like strength and a continuation of becoming more comfortable in my own skin. Around this time, Amy and I got nicknames. For her elegant writing style as well as her engaged demeanor in class she became Grace, and for my soul-searching grit and candor I became Courage.

We broke into groups to edit each other’s essays; we read them aloud and took feedback; we shared our final drafts via email. I also made use of the Writing Center and most importantly, the office hour with the professor. By the time of the third essay assignment, critiquing the university industry, I was sure that my writing abilities were getting sharper. As luck would have it, I shared the office hour with Ria Shah, an Ohioan of South Asian heritage on a varsity tennis scholarship, whose writing style, a unique blend of expert presentation and personal witness, I much admired. She read her draft to us, and I saw for the first time the value of multiple revisions. That was how she was able to deliver such powerful and thoughtful persuasion. However, when I shared my first draft, my thoughts were all over the place and the anxiety started to flood in. Although she and the professor said positive things and tried to keep my spirits up, I left the session discouraged. On my drive home I was trying to get my thoughts together, and when I sat at my desk I began to write. I did not make an outline; the words started to flow and flow until I found myself getting emotional over the realizations I was experiencing. Yes, diversity was what I needed, but it took writing the essay to make the discovery that being open to diversity was the cure for my cave condition and the secret code to my serenity. It may be corny, but at this moment I realized how therapeutic writing has become for me. Now I knew I no longer could be in a place where I constantly felt compared to everyone else. I no longer felt like I could not do what I wanted because it might not have been what everyone else did in fear of judgment. Nevertheless, I had this thought growing inside of me that I was pathetic and cowardly for bailing on Cave and coming back home to mommy and daddy. That is not the norm these days, and sometimes I was ashamed of myself and second-guessed the decision constantly.  

Writing this third essay caused me to see that courage, not cowardice, motivated my leap out of Cave. Staying some place that was so familiar and deadening was the real problem. Breaking out of the restraints of Cave has been my own personal education, and the fulfillment I now felt in myself was well worth the apprehension. Moreover, this false version of me pleasing others and not paying attention to my inner voice had worn me down, and the class revealed to me that my real self has an empathetic heart, a mind that is highly organized and a wild tongue that won’t be tamed. I learned how to learn and I finally caught on that what other people think about me is really not my problem.

One day, I hope to become a teacher. I love kids, and I know education is my true passion. New York City and Long Island gain more immigrants every year, and that means that there are more immigrants in the classroom. In my education classes, my professors spend a lot of time discussing how to cope with English-Language-Learners, students from different economic backgrounds and with different disabilities and needs. These are all forms of diversity, and for me to be exposed to it at my age is really helping me to expand my human knowledge base. I want to educate the whole person by going beyond reading, writing and ‘rithmatic and teaching the value of being your own person. So many think that kids do not have minds of their own, but when I go to my observation at a pre-school, I am blown away every single time with how intelligent are these four-year-olds. I want my students to know that I will be there to listen and encourage them to be themselves, because I think it is vital to embed that in children from the youngest age. As much as I loved growing up in the schools that I attended, I do not think I was told this often enough.

Lawrence Kohlberg’s “Stages of Moral Development” examines the ways people progress and mature ethically. In stages 3 and 4, people are conventional. Their “behavior is what pleases or helps others and is approved by them.” That had been me for too long! Now I am at 4.5, a transitional phase faced by college-aged students “who come to see conventional morality as socially constructed, thus, relative and arbitrary.” The young adult realizes that some of the norms she used to believe were as absolute as the Ten Commandments are not actually that vital, and she starts to grow into her own person. That is what happened to me. First came the neediness which begat the conformity; next came the crisis which begat the clarity.  

If high school students going through the college admissions process ever ask me for advice, I would tell them to avoid going some place that they’re familiar with, to strike out and explore something new, and most important, do what they feel in their heart will make them happiest. At the end of the day, college is four years of our lives. Yes, to some it may be the “best years of your life,” but to others, it is just four years. When I look back on my college experience, I just want to know that I was the happiest I could be at that time, and that is what I am now doing. Who would have thought my search for self-discovery would be only twenty minutes away from my Long Island sheltered home? 

"Running Off the Rails" by Shoujing Zheng

 

 

Many people have convinced themselves to believe they are who they are in order to cater the favor of the society. The minstrel believes he comes to the world to ease people’s mind with his magnificent melody. The butcher believes his existence is for cutting pork or shark fins. The lawyer believes he is the defender of justice. As Alan Watts, a British-born philosopher, points out, “Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” Yet this realm of nature has its own limitation, which confines most people to a fenced enclosure during most of their lives, like a transparent dome above everybody’s head. Normally the dome is hard to perceive. Even though people do realize its existence, most of them try not to touch it because of the overwhelming force coming from the society. The force, which keeps the wheels of people’s train-thought on their rails, is known as a taboo.

I grew up under such a dome, a meticulous and artificial wall determined by my country. My father’s generation used to be fed with the information that China is the strongest country in the world while the people living in capitalist nations are waiting to be emancipated by the great proletariat. With the passing away of Mao and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the propaganda finally declined and people began to realize how poor they were and how this country desperately needed to develop its economy. Nonetheless, the dome is still there: the main news agency is still run by the state, and people cannot found other parties and only join the communist party. The constitution provides us with the most munificent rights in the world, the right of freedom, the right of parade…. Yet those empty promises just exist in the books. Indeed, we live in intersting times.

I began to gradually get the sense of the taboo after finishing my University Entrance Examination, a special Chinese exam that compels students to spend every available minute of their high school time studying if they want to go to a prestigious university in China. In order to find out the truth that the government was hiding, I read and watched almost anything I could get. I spent so much time, and so many efforts, that the learning experience of Frederick Douglass speaks to me so well when I read about his story: “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed.”

I also associate with the movie “The Matrix.” Although the hero Neo always feels that something, a tiny portion of his life, is too abnormal to believe, he would never have imagined that human beings, lying unconsciously under the icy boxes while stuck in the illusion of enjoying civilization of modern life, are actually under the control of the ruthless machine. Neo suffers from great pain and numbness after he confronts the unbearable truth, which pushes him into the transformation from just being a normal and mediocre person who is under the manipulation of the captor to an omnipotent savior. That is what Neo has gone through when he tries to figure out the truth of life. Just like Douglass, I didn’t handle the blocked information very well. The anger caused by feeling fooled and the pain caused by fear occupied my life at the same time. What I feel towards Neo is envy. He is chosen to fight against the taboo while in real life most people can do nothing but become a coward filled with hatred. After all, life is not a movie.

But I don’t want to be a hater, nor do I want to be a coward. There are many ways to cope with censorship, and leaving is one of them. Frankly, this is one of the reasons I chose to become an exchange student and study in America. When I read “The Ballot or the Bullet” by Malcolm X, I admired his guts to boycott the discrimination by shouting out: “I’m one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism.” Yet the nationalism he advocated to remove the taboo is too violent for me or for normal people. The nationalism may work well for black people fighting for their rights in 1960s, yet the last time Chinese people tried to join a march for liberty and democracy, it led to difficulty.

While I came to America, the sense of loss, across the Pacific Ocean, came along with me. Avoiding shall never be an ultimate solution. It may ease the mind for a while, but it hides somewhere deep in the heart like a volcano waiting to erupt again. You have to face it in a nonviolent way, be optimistic and stayed open-minded. Like Watts said: “Faith is, above all, openness—an act of trust in the unknown.”

Openness is actually what Watts implemented in his life. As a westerner, he embraced Buddhism and Hinduism, which obviously contradict Christianity in a lot of aspects. He criticizes commitment, saying, “Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world.” An open mind liberates Watts from the confinement of taboo, a dome that is so effective that people have stayed inside it for hundreds of years.

With the help of an open mind, a seemingly unsolvable problem tangling me for a long period is resolved. The government may be tenacious about the absolute governing over its people, and is very sensitive about any movement that threatens its governing. The first step you need to do is still hold the open-minded attitude. After accepting a fact for what it is, you can start to learn about it and try to communicate or interact with it. Total repudiation can only ruin all the progress that has been made so far and result in a retrogressing crisis. If you want to liberate your own people, you have to liberate yourself through an open mind first.

No matter whether you live in China, America, or anywhere else in the world, there was, is and will be a transparent dome. The society can never be perfect, so the impetus for making today better than yesterday shall always exist. Individuals can never be perfect, so people have the desire to learn so as to overcome their deficiency. The taboo should not be the blasting fuse for violence; it should be the start for improvement. An open mind can create a tolerant society which allows different voices. If you get tired of keeping the wheels of thoughts on the same rails all the time, why not try to run off the rails for a time or two. Maybe a whole new rail can be found by a movement that someone claims to be dangerous.

Don't Worry, Warring Nations: The Bankers Have Your Back

“You’ll know war’s been defeated when you
cannot leave your room.”
by Norman Ball

(This essay appeared previously at Dissident Voice.)

The erasure of national sovereignty leads, not to Shangri-La as some Eurocentrists would have it, but to a supranational consolidated ‘sovereignty’ presided over by banking interests, which is no sovereignty at all. On the contrary, it’s the Town Hall of the Panopticon.

Greece is not some idiot uncle who simply needs a loan to get back on his feet. That’s a tragic misread fraught with stereotype. Greece is the canary in our mine-shaft, loss-leader on the road to global debt servitude. As goes Greece so too will go the world in due course. Others wait in the wings: Puerto Rico, Italy, Portugal, the US. From the back of the cave, day-lit miners are easily mistaken for canaries.

It’s the math, stupid. That there exists an irrevocable tipping point of accumulated debt derives from the law of large numbers. Debt-money has unsustainability built into its Ponzi structure –unless we get the Martian mineral mines cranking in short order. (Exogenous resources expand the denominator. But then what next? Diamond mining on Saturn?)

In the meantime, the Earth wearies of being picked at for mindless, usurious advance. Those who run the Ponzi are not wringing their hands in distress. Debt is a consciously devised weapon for bringing the world to its knees. This ‘abyss’ is a planned rendezvous. 

So, all the media histrionics about spendthrift nations tempting perfectly avoidable black holes, the character defects of the lazy Greeks, etc. are misdirecting narratives meant to disguise a premeditated arrival point that awaits even ‘fiscally responsible’ nations. The tipping point is a mathematical certainty, not a moral defect in the Southern European character.

Debt is an accusatory finger pointed at the People while the other hand gathers the former’s national treasures as ‘recompense’. The trumped-up contempt for national sovereignty rests upon a circuitous myth: That war in Europe has traditionally been precipitated by jingoism and toxic forms of nationalism, when in fact these are second-order manifestations brought on by the boom-bust manipulations and economic crises caused by the very financial interests that now endeavor to ‘rescue Europe’ from the fascist recoil the former set in motion. How neat. How tidy. We’ve been schooled since birth in ass-backwardness. Debt is not a handmaiden to growth. Debt devours growth; for without it, the former perishes. Nor is debt agnostic. On the contrary, it is laden with agenda as all weapons are.

So when we hear the idealistic refrains of committed Eurocentrists (i.e. idealists presumably, as these hapless cheerleaders lack a stake in the centralized outcome), we witness stupendous naivete greeting circular logic with open arms. Paraphrasing the circle:

“Anoint us as your ruling elite and we will refrain from playing the gaps that have historically visited ruin upon you, indeed delivered you to such desperate straits that you would even consider anointing us as your ruling elite.”

These various ‘sovereignties’ (lampooned to ridiculousness in ‘Borat’ caricatures and the like) happen to comprise the variegated splendor of the human race. Perhaps humanity’s a little too splendid for your tastes? God made the nations. Petition Him, why dontcha!

Core identity springs from sovereignty (the latter really a geo-politicized term for community, coherence and social comity). Sovereignty is the only potent ‘reservoir of recoil’ against a powerful centralizing force. National sovereignty is a life jacket against supranational hegemony. There is a frying pan. There is a fire. It pays to know which is which.

Power didn’t raise no fools. Fully recognizing its enemy (and faced with a prey that’s been trained to sees its enemy as its fwend), absolute power insists its enemy is our enemy, when in fact its enemy is us. Saturation media reinforces the trope of self-loathing. An indeterminate flatland will no doubt aid administrative management, Max Weber’s foretold nightmare. Part of this tactic, again, involves denigrating sovereignty ceaselessly in the hopes of banishing it forever to a pejorative neverland. Another tactic is to flood all pockets of distinction (and social coherence) with waves of outsiders, in effect burying the former alive in their own backyards. Note how the inoffensive euphemism ‘open borders’ is promulgated by the media to gloss what clearer heads cannot mistake for a mass invasion.

The powers-that-be seek gray, flattened automatons alienated from everything that makes them human and distinct –veritable warm bodies whose raisson d’etre consists in holding up the consumer end of card swipes. Sheldon Wolin calls the present system ‘inverted totalitarianism’, a grim evolution from ‘classical totalitarianism’. Suppose though we’re in the grips of a determined eschatology, from proto- to perfected totalitarianism? The ‘perfections’, you ask? Rallying cries are beholden to things that need rallying against. Mussolini, so easily detestable, has been inverted into an odorless colorless gas. You can’t hang oxygen from a lamppost.

Centralization is a thus devil’s bargain that swaps lesser ruins for an eclipsing ruin from which there will be no easy escape. The surveillance super-state will detect intimations of dissent before they congeal into barely-formed intentions. Every hill cannot be taken at once. One hill must serve as lever. Inverted totalitarianism is the ultimate invisibility (ubiquity) cloak.

Today’s Stasi is a trillion eyeballs peering from all pedestrian sides, an army of clever toasters and sensate devices measuring our biorhythms, sizing us up for our propensity for future crime, all the while baiting us with that ingratiating bitch, convenience, and the solicitous winks of emoticons –pixels mocked up to be our flatland fwends! It’s enough to warm the pixels of your heart.

So you’ve been warned. Never touch a sentient doorknob while nursing a fever. You could be mistaken for a hothead. The Internet of Things will work tirelessly for the State (as things do not tire). Without pay. Without compunction. Kitchen appliances will reveal the dark brooding side of inanimateness. The heat of the kitchen hides a multitude of sins! Never curse your skillet. Beneath the scrambled eggs the clever ones are taking notes.

The enemy is ubiquitous and soon to be eternally ensconced. Fortunately manufactured consent has taught us to love and embrace our self-harm. So there need not be a fight. Even a whimper detracts from TV time.

As Wolin points out brilliantly, the instigators and seeming foremen of the Panopticon are themselves unconscious cogs in a system of vague and indeterminate tyranny. With everyone comporting a touch of gray, no one villain warrants the gallows as no one departure is singular enough to halt dystopian advance. 

The Internet of Things is the distributive architecture of complicity. Jeff Zuckerberg became a billionaire launching a pro bono spy apparatus which avails our services both as surveillance target and dutiful cataloger of our every move. Never again will the gumshoe sigh into the camera, ‘damn I lost him at the lights.’ We are he. They are we.

Which brings us to the zipperless fuck of perfected lockdown…

We cannot thwart an enemy we inhabit. Nor can we forestall a future that, by virtue of ubiquitous arrival, rescinds the coordinates of discrete arrival for a mysterious, spontaneous omnipresence.